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Friday, April 29, 2016

This year I attended OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas from Apr 25th - 29th for the first time. As it wraps up today and I am heading home, I wanted to look back and share what you missed from my perspective.

As an application developer focused technology evangelist is has been a lot of fun shifting into the infrastructure, container, management and Cloud based technologies that encompass the Red Hat product portfolio, instead of just focusing on the middleware JBoss space.

OpenStack Summit was the place to deep dive into the markets, technology, developers and users of the OpenStack platform, one of the core technologies from my new favorite Red Hat Cloud Suite product.

If you look at the architecture of the Red Hat Cloud Suite you will find OpenStack is a pretty prominent technology and Red Hat has a large presence at the OpenStack Summit this year.

Amazing attendee totals!

Day 1

It kicked off with a keynote session that started off strong with a visionary look at Bi-Modal IT as the Foundation for Digital Business from Gartner's Donna Scott. Nice to see that they are fully invested in the ongoing story around digital business dealing with mode 1 and mode 2 together to continue to grow the business that is 20% of revenue coming out of mode 1 right now, projecting to 40% with oncoming mode 2 driven digital business revenue.

Some cool slides and themes of cartoons were used in all the venue with some interesting numbers of 75 attendees in 2010 becoming 7500 attendees today in 2016! Well done and pretty well organized event.

Worked this lounge.

The rest of the 'keynotes' sort of bled into a blur of 10 minute by AT&T, Marantis (who's message was backed by gansta clothes and video of vodka drinking Russians, very weird...), SAP, Red Hat and Volkswagen all showcasing their use of OpenStack.

I tried to attend OpenStack Infrastructure for Beginners but was blocked at the door being told it was overloaded. While next door there was a room for a talk about TOC of OpenStack with 100's of open seats... don't you hate it when that happens?

After lunch I spent a few hours with Scott McCarty at the Container Experts Lounge meeting and discussing all manner of application development in containers and on Clouds. I met a lot of people here, love this about meeting and chatting with all these developers out there.

There were a few sessions that rated an in room sketch artist working live on a blank sign and picking up some of the topics, subjects and examples during the talk to translate them to the sign. This was really cool and many examples were then lined up along the wall during the talks that came later so you could browse these mind map like displays.

Scott McCarty gave a dynamic and fast paced session covering how much better your life can be if you use OpenShift and OpenStack together. Not only did he cover the topic he did a live demo of how this can work on stage, with his laptop hosting I believe he said a nested VM image series of 4 VM's.

Check it out as the session was recorded live:

All the while Scott was talking, next to the stage this artist was doing a live sketch of what was being covered in his session, amazing to watch this unfold.

Live sketch of the talk as it
happened, here are the final results!

After that the marketplace opened up to host a booth crawl and the Red Hat booth was swamped with attendees looking to check out the OpenStack pods, get a hat, grab a t-shirt and tell us how much they love the story Red Hat is bringing to market.

Personally, I was amazed to bump into old friends and colleagues from all over the world that were passing through to catch up on OpenStack and networking. Spent time at the Rackspace Cantina setup down the street with old colleagues, had lunch with a small group of new Red Hat colleagues and drinks in the marketplace with people from Asia, Europe and NA.

Red Hat booth swamped,
all t-shirts and hats gone
in first hour... amazing!

Day 2

I kicked off day 2 with a longer breakfast with colleagues discussion the past days events, comparing notes from our evening and planning out the rest of day 2.

The keynotes were not that exciting so headed off to catch some of the technical session. In a super small room the first was Container Based Dynamic Service Chaining and Injection, where most of the attendees were left standing in the back of the room. It was a deep dive into a small new project that was putting APIs into their service chains to allow for external applications to dynamically modify a service in the chain.

Another talk was Learning You Some OpenStack for Great Good by Rackspace, which was just an overview around OpenStack and Clouds and a small demo that was not very coherent and limited by the venue networking. A real problem with OpenStack demos has been that they are not running locally and networking will always be a issue.

Standing room only in Container Security talk.

Spent some time today just hanging around the Red Hat booth having conversations with people from all over the industry. Lots of interest in container technologies, how Atomic OS fits into the story, what Red Hat Cloud Suite brings to their solution strategy and a lot of interest in the swag that flew out the door on day 1. The marketplace where all the booths are located was buzzing the entire time it was open, not at all dead during sessions, amazing energy captured there that would be good to see at other conferences.

Armadillos!

Had lunch with several colleagues from Ansible fame, talking about community growth and how the integration into Red Hat has been going as their technology is bringing value to several product lines.

The afternoon session I caught was by Thomas Cameron talking about container security which drew standing room only crowds.

New insights into Red Hat and the thoughts they are having with regards to securing these pesky containers as they grow in your enterprise.

Then the evening came around where we all hit the Red Hat party at Bangers on Rainey Street. This was a huge blowout with lines to get in all the way up to closing.

Red Hat party!

Music, over 100 beers on tap, BBQ running and live armadillos which might be the Texas state animal. Lots of laughs, meeting up with friends and old colleagues along with the new, good times had by all.

Day 3
This day started the Containers and Telecom/NFV tracks kicked off. I sniffed around in a few sessions and think that I found the smallest room for giving a talk at OpenStack Summit, only 30 chairs and it felt like you were in the front row no matter where you sat (see picture)!

After lunch we had a partner event over at Rackspace Cantina where we mingled and enjoyed the drinks while chatting about the Red Hat products tied to Rackspace hosting solutions for the Cloud.

I also joined a talk called Is That A Cloud in your Pocket. Very funny analogy from an APAC friend of mine how it is easy to put together your OpenStack platform on a small 125 GB SSD with lots of New Zealand references to Lord of the Rings!

Evening was spent touring around Austin to visit North America consulting hosted drinks, dinner with a Cloud Tiger Team lead and then heading home for some rest to keep up with the last day.

Speaker had more room than we did!

Day 4
This turned out to be mostly about the community and design meet ups so not a lot of sessions to report on. In the morning Lars Herrmann had an interesting talk on orchestrated containerization with OpenStack.

I spent the rest of my day around the booth and when that closed down headed off to lunch with Red Hat Design team leaders.

As I fly home I am looking back on a very well organized and fruitful week at OpenStack Summit, would recommend it to any and all for next year. Hope to see you there!

This demonstration shows how Red Hat is helping optimize traditional IT environments. There are many ways in which Red Hat does this, from discovering and right sizing virtual machines to free up space in virtual data centers, to creating a standard operating environment across heterogeneous environments to reduce complexity.

In this demonstration, however, the focus is on how Red Hat enables organizations to migrate workloads to their ideal platform. In the video you’ll see how using tools found in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform in conjunction with automation and orchestration from Red Hat CloudForms it’s possible to migrate virtual machines in an automated fashion from VMware vSphere to either RHEV or Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

You can sign up for a virtual event that will be held online, filled with sessions, keynotes and exciting examples of what the Red Hat Cloud Suite can do to open the Cloud for developing modern day applications.

As an application developer or architect tasked with exploring the possibilities that containerized applications offer, Red Hat provides a Container Development Kit (CDK) that has all the tooling you need for your local OSX, Linux or Windows environment. It also has a few containers pre-configured for you to explore.

This article will get you started in just minutes with the entire Red Hat CDK installed locally on your personal machine.

What you get

First off, the Red Hat CDK is a product that is available to customers and partners, for more details on who has access and how to obtain access, see Red Hat Developers. Also for the details around what specifications for your machine, see the online documentation.

The Red Hat CDK is packaged into a RHEL 7 virtual machine that you can start on your machine after installing this project. There are several choices provided with pre-configured installations, but they all include the basic setup for Docker and the tools needed to start leveraging Docker based containers.

The following containers can be started after installing this project for you to start exploring:

OpenShift Enterprise - a containerized version of OpenShift Enterprise can be started that can be accesses through a Web console in your browser or via the OpenShift command line tools. Explore your very own private PaaS developer experience with this container.

Kubernetes - a container to set you up for exploring a Kubernetes cluster. It is setup to run as an all-in-one Kubernetes master to manage pods and node for running multiple pods.

CDK install demo!

On top of this you can start creating your own container based applications after you are comfortable with how these examples work.

Container development

As you might not want to go through all the steps in the installation guide time and again to setup the Red Hat CDK on your machine, here I hope to make it so simple anyone can do it.

Not only that, you can do it in just four steps, I promise!

It is really that easy with the fully automated Container Development Kit Install Demo project put together to make the process both fool proof and repeatable. So what are the three steps you ask?

It will check if you have the pre-requisites installed, but if you don't and start the installation it will stop, warn you and provide the links to go and get what is missing. The same goes for the products needed, which depend on your OS for the correct virtual image you need to run the Red Hat CDK, don't worry, it will point you in the right direction if you read the output.

For more information around containers, a Cloud stack and why you need to care about this containerized stack for your application development, see the App Dev Cloud Stack series that takes you on a tour of the Red Hat Cloud Suite.

We will be back soon to dive deeper into how these container examples in the Red Hat CDK look and how to get started with them.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

We talked about the various layers from the bottom up and there was a reason to this story that is clear today as Red Hat launches the Red Hat Cloud Suite.

Red Hat Cloud Suite is an integrated combination of open source software, including a container-based application development platform and massively-scaleable cloud infrastructure, with a unified management framework.

Red Hat Cloud Suite is the first of what will be a family of Red Hat Suites, which are a combination of multiple Red Hat products optimized to work together and solve a specific customer scenario, with increased ease of use and management for customers.

What is Red Hat Cloud Suite

At its infrastructure foundation, Red Hat Cloud Suite builds a private cloud based either on Red Hat OpenStack Platform with public cloud-like scalability as well as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, which is based on high-performance virtualization. Both of these underlying choices provide secure and scalable foundations for hosting the development platform known as OpenShift Enterprise. OpenShift automates the development and administration of container-based applications.

App Dev on the Red Hat Cloud Suite
is the OpenShift Enterprise
experience.

This marriage of infrastructure and application development is seamlessly administered by a unified, single management framework offered by Red Hat CloudForms, and complemented by powerful lifecycle management from Red Hat Satellite.

Red Hat Cloud Suite users can also make use of Red Hat Ceph Storage, an open, massively scalable, highly flexible software-defined storage system that is now bundled with Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Red Hat Ceph Storage is designed for commodity hardware and overwhelmingly preferred by OpenStack users because of its seamless integration with OpenStack’s modular architecture and components for ephemeral and persistent storage.

App Dev on Red Hat Cloud Suite

As you can imagine, this is a complete and all encompassing Cloud stack solution that offers a lot to an enterprise, but might be left asking yourself, "How can I experience the Red Hat Cloud Suite as an application developer?"

The App Dev examples ready for you to
explore the Red Hat Cloud Suite

In preparation for this product launch we have been working hard to provide you with exactly that, the application developer experience. When you look at the product architecture and if you have followed the App Dev Cloud Stack series, you will find your window to the Cloud as an application developer is OpenShift Enterprise.

We have been busy putting together the following example projects so that you can get a taste of the Red Hat Cloud Suite from the comfort of your own local machine, no data center needed. The widow to this world for application developers is OpenShift Enterprise, so we have provide this through the Red Hat Container Development Kit (CDK) and JBoss middleware examples.

Check out the following example projects available for you to explore:

That is quite an arsenal to get you started and rocking in the Red Hat Cloud, but we are not finished. Be sure to stay tuned for more around application development on Red Hat integrated solutions like the Red Hat Cloud Suite.

We then provided two getting started projects with JBoss BRMS and JBoss BPM Suite products running on the Red Hat CDK. These were just initial setups of the products and the projects you can create there are left up to you to develop.

Booking your travel in the Cloud

We will be leveraging previous work that installs the Red Hat CDK. The Red Hat CDK is packaged into a RHEL 7 virtual machine that you can start on your machine after installing this project. There are several choices provided with pre-configured installations, but they all include the basic setup for Docker and the tools needed to start leveraging Docker based containers.

OpenShift Enterprise - a containerized version of OpenShift Enterprise can be started that can be accesses through a Web console in your browser or via the OpenShift command line tools. Explore your very own private PaaS developer experience with this container.

Now that the you have the OpenShift Enterprise image up and running, you can start moving the JBoss Travel Agency project into the Cloud with the following steps:

First complete the installation and start the OpenShift image supplied in the cdk-install-demo.

Now you are up and running with a fully installed, Cloud ready JBoss Travel Agency project!

For more information around containers, a Cloud stack and why you need to care about this containerized stack for your application development, see the App Dev Cloud Stack series that takes you on a tour of the Red Hat Cloud Suite.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

If you have been paying attention the last few months you will have noticed a certain focus change on the work being presented here. It is not only focused on JBoss middleware products, though they have been used in the demo projects used to illustrate the shift.

There has been a certain shift towards getting developers acquainted with their Cloud stack. We took a tour of the Cloud stack, starting the series with a statement that developers "...can't ignore the stack anymore!"

Get cloudy with Red Hat CDK
and JBoss middleware
application development examples.

No reason not to start using the OpenShift Enterprise image for your very own self-service private PaaS today!

Application development examples run anywhere

Watch for this new install option in the
JBoss BRMS & BPM Suite example projects!

Up to now you have been able to run your example projects locally, in the OpenShift Online account (this is OpenShift version 2, not using containers) and you had the option to generate a containerized installation of the project.

Today we have added the option to install and run them on your own local private PaaS that leverages OpenShift Enterprise.

The following projects are ready for you to start using the all new installation options:

You can leverage a retail example based on JBoss BRMS through the business central web console running containerized on an OSE pod. It was a demo and therefore not leveraging any realistic persistent storage beyond an in memory datasource.

Automated build of JBoss Cool Store
with Cloud ready persistence.

Shall we add a real instance of persistent storage, configure a working datasource like Postgresql?

Retail in the Cloud with storage

We will be leveraging previous work that installs the Red Hat CDK. The Red Hat CDK is packaged into a RHEL 7 virtual machine that you can start on your machine after installing this project. There are several choices provided with pre-configured installations, but they all include the basic setup for Docker and the tools needed to start leveraging Docker based containers.

OpenShift Enterprise - a containerized version of OpenShift Enterprise can be started that can be accesses through a Web console in your browser or via the OpenShift command line tools. Explore your very own private PaaS developer experience with this container.

JBoss Cool Store with a Postgresql instance
to provide backing storage in a pod.

Now you are up and running with a fully installed, Cloud ready JBoss Cool Store . If you want to learn how to build the Cool Store from the ground up, check out this online workshop:

For more information around containers, a Cloud stack and why you need to care about this containerized stack for your application development, see the App Dev Cloud Stack series that takes you on a tour of the Red Hat Cloud Suite.

This was fun to bring some of the basics to get you started on my favorite Platform as a Service (PaaS) and it was my first experience writing for a publisher that delved only into e-books. This one was made available around the world for $3.99 in e-formats.

The book is becoming a bit outdated and I was pondering my next writing project when I received this letter from the publisher:

"We would like to inform you that developer.press is ceasing its operations, effective immediately. This also includes the removal of all titles published by developer.press from all distribution platforms, as well as all planned publication projects under the umbrella of developer.press.

We apologize for any inconvenience this news may have caused and we would like to thank you for your immense support and for the fruitful collaboration. You will regain all rights concerning your books published at developer.press with immediate effect. You are therefore allowed to use and publish your texts where and however you want."

As of today I am putting this book out there for anyone and everyone to freely download. When we share, we are stronger.

We then provided two getting started projects with JBoss BRMS and JBoss BPM Suite products running on the Red Hat CDK. These were just initial setups of the products and the projects you can create there are left up to you to develop.

Mortgage process in the Cloud

We will be leveraging previous work that installs the Red Hat CDK. The Red Hat CDK is packaged into a RHEL 7 virtual machine that you can start on your machine after installing this project. There are several choices provided with pre-configured installations, but they all include the basic setup for Docker and the tools needed to start leveraging Docker based containers.

OpenShift Enterprise - a containerized version of OpenShift Enterprise can be started that can be accesses through a Web console in your browser or via the OpenShift command line tools. Explore your very own private PaaS developer experience with this container.

Now that the you have the OpenShift Enterprise image up and running, you can start moving the JBoss Mortgage project into the Cloud with the following steps:

First complete the installation and start the OpenShift image supplied in the cdk-install-demo.

For more information around containers, a Cloud stack and why you need to care about this containerized stack for your application development, see the App Dev Cloud Stack series that takes you on a tour of the Red Hat Cloud Suite.